Our Little Cruelties

by Liz Nugent

‘He’s living like a tramp. Aren’t you supposed to be looking after his finances?’

  ‘How am I supposed to get money to him when I don’t know where he is?’

  When Luke first started making money, Mum insisted that Luke should ask Tony King, her accountant, to look after his finances. I don’t know how well Tony looked after Luke, but the one good thing he had done was to persuade Luke to buy a house. Luke was ridiculous with money, buying extravagant, outrageous and inappropriate gifts for us just because he could. On Daisy’s third birthday, he turned up with a pony in a horsebox for her on our suburban street. He had not thought about stabling or fees or the fact that she was too small to get up on a pony. It caused chaos for a couple of weeks. The sellers had seen him coming, the animal was worth bugger all and was too old even to be trained for anything. We couldn’t get an animal sanctuary to take it and had to arrange for it to be put down. Even when we tried to explain the consequences of his ‘gift’ to Luke, he just shrugged and said he thought girls loved ponies. I always worried about how easy it was to take advantage of him. Now Brian had taken over the management of Luke’s career and it seemed like Luke had given his house away. I don’t know which of my brothers was more useless.

  Luke came back inside and returned my phone. ‘Wow, she’s really freaking out, you know? Screaming at me, that I should have called. She says I have to go home.’

  ‘Maybe you should?’ said Brian, and inside I was thinking no, please don’t come home because then you’ll be our problem. We’ll have to look out for you and clear up your messes and suffer the embarrassment of your public outbursts. At least when Luke was in New York, he was out of sight, out of mind.

  ‘She doesn’t really want me home,’ said Luke simply, ‘she just wants a story she can tell on the radio. She’s going on the Marian Finucane Show tomorrow.’

  He pushed his Caesar salad around his plate and shaded his eyes from our steaks.

  ‘Luke, who are your friends here? Who do you hang out with?’ asked Brian gently.

  ‘You see, that’s the thing I discovered. I don’t need friends. I don’t need much food. I only need about half the amount I was eating. My mind is crystal clear now. I only saw about the Twin Towers on a TV in a shop window and some newspaper headlines, but I don’t buy into what the media are telling us. I haven’t read newspapers in I don’t know how long. Hey, what day is it?’

  I was losing patience.

  ‘It’s Sunday, but, Luke, if you don’t need people, maybe we should just drop you back to Harlem and go to the airport. You’re happy here, right?’

  His eyes filled with tears and he cried, big explosive shuddering tears.

  Bastard, mouthed Brian at me.

  Brian put his arm around Luke and Luke leaned into him the way he used to with Dad when he was a small boy. It was a pitiful sight.

  ‘Luke, I really don’t believe you’re thinking too clearly. Now tell me the truth, have you been taking your meds?’ Brian was good with kids. No wonder Daisy loved him. But Luke was a thirty-one-year-old man with the sensibilities of a seven-year-old. Tears still falling, he shook his head.

  ‘I’m lonely,’ he sobbed.

  I was embarrassed. The restaurant was nearly empty, but the few other diners all looked sympathetically in our direction, no doubt assuming this was some 9/11-related trauma.

  ‘It’s okay, we’re going to bring you home to Ireland and we’re going to look after you. You can leave Sharky D right here. You can look up some of your old musician friends. I think you sing best when you’re with other people, right?’

  Brian kicked me again. I was holding back tears myself. I’d never seen Luke broken. I’d seen him in the psych ward when he was catatonic on antipsychotic meds and I’d seen him jump off a forty-foot-high truss into a crowd at a gig and dislocate his collarbone when he was manically high, but this pathetic sobbing mess was new to me.

  ‘Yeah, Luke, come home, we miss you,’ I said, and it wasn’t altogether a lie. I missed the kid on the red scooter with the smart answers who’d always share every treat he got. I missed the shy singer who, at the beginning of his career, performed with his back to the audience, thinking he was Van Morrison or whatever. I missed the brother he could have been.

  ‘Mum doesn’t miss me. She doesn’t love me.’ This was a recurring theme with Luke when he was having an episode. He had stored up every single way that our mother had apparently slighted him since he was a toddler and went over and over these things in his head. It was true that Mum didn’t love us equally. I knew that because I was obviously the most successful and least screwed-up and she would express it by exclaiming, ‘Why can’t your brothers be more like you?’ but she must have loved us all, in her way.

  Two days later, we three brothers flew back to Dublin. As Brian predicted, Luke changed his mind three times about whether he would come with us and Brian dispensed the sedatives that allowed us to make the decision for him. We relinquished the lease on the fleapit in Harlem and left everything behind except Luke’s guitar.

  In Dublin, Brian evicted Luke’s ‘friends’ who had been staying in the house he owned but not paying any rent. Brian moved in with Luke, ostensibly to supervise him, but it suited Brian too as he got free rent. At least, that’s what I thought he got. It was months later before I discovered the truth.

  Brian’s act of altruism was a shocking sham. It later turned out that Luke had run up tens of thousands in debt. Managed by Brian, Luke sold him the house for a fraction of what it was worth to get himself debt-free and then became Brian’s tenant. Brian had secretly shafted his own brother.

  I was furious when I found out from Mum what had been going on with the finances. Mum was troubled by it but thought it was better that Brian was ‘in charge’ of Luke. She didn’t want to be his custodian either. I challenged Brian, but he pointed out sharply that I had never offered to help Luke, that Brian was his carer now and that it was a full-time job. He’d had to give up teaching. He reckoned he’d earned it.

  When Luke got well, at least temporarily, he wanted to be independent. He moved into a rented apartment and made music again. Luke genuinely didn’t care about money or houses or belongings. But within a year of 9/11, he had slipped backwards again and was living in a similarly broken-down house arrangement in Dublin. He stopped taking his meds and became a figure of either pity or ridicule in the media when he was photographed, shoeless, busking on Grafton Street, being heckled by teenagers.

  I let Brian take care of all that. Mum and I didn’t need to be linked to Luke in the gossip pages. We made no comment to the media. Besides, I was busy and my marriage was beginning to fall apart. I didn’t have the time for Luke. If Brian was going to live off Luke, he could do the babysitting.

  12

  2004

  Susan caught me. I had been careful, always, but women’s intuition is not to be underestimated. Sometimes they just know. She was always suspicious about Mary in the office and, indeed, it was obvious that Mary had been throwing herself at me ever since she started working with us. And while I was not immune to Mary’s cleavage, I was not going to jeopardize the smooth running of the office. Gerald and I were business partners. Gerald had come out of college at the same time as me and immediately afterwards went to film school in London. When we met, he had been assistant director on some shorts and commercials. He knew film, actors, cinematographers and screenwriters. He was great to work with. Our first feature, The Inpatient, had been a festival success, though not a commercial one. Our second film, Naked Bakers, had caught the teenage market and had made us a force to be reckoned with on the European circuit, though America still seemed impossible to crack. I had studied contracts, entertainment law, Section 42 funding, and I was an astute negotiator. Gerald liked Susan and Susan liked him. We worked well together, even though the dynamic changed slightly when I hired Mary.

  ‘Please don’t fuck her,’ he said, minutes after Mary had left the interview for the job. She was clearly overqualifi
ed, but she really wanted the low-paid administration role we were offering. She was capable of a lot more. We were already stretched thinly and she would certainly be useful. Gerald knew I was having a few flings here and there, but he was never judgemental about these things. What happened between two consenting adults was their own business, he felt. A mature attitude. Perhaps because Gerald’s homosexual activities had only been legalized seven years earlier.

  But it wasn’t Mary who Susan caught me with. It was Kate. I was in my mid-thirties and Kate was twenty, but the way Susan went on about it, you’d think I was a paedophile. Kate was nothing to do with the film business. She was my dental hygienist. Any girl who can fall for a man after wedging his jaw open and removing the calculus and caffeine stains from his teeth must be sincere. As she was taking off her surgical gloves, she advised me to cut back on my coffee drinking. ‘That’s a shame,’ I said. ‘Would you like to join me for a cup of tea instead?’

  ‘Sorry?’ She blushed and it was cute.

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I shouldn’t have said it.’ Playing bashful works with certain women, plus I was only testing the waters. She laughed then and said she was about to take her lunch break and she wouldn’t mind if I joined her. But she pointed at my wedding ring. ‘You’re married. I’m not interested. Let’s just eat.’ I was only mildly disappointed. She was refreshingly honest.

  Lunch was relaxed and pleasant. She had started working in this practice recently after completing her two-year diploma. ‘Everyone thinks that hygienists are stupid, that we’re just not clever enough to be dentists,’ she said, voicing my exact opinion. After school, she couldn’t face another five years of study so she’d opted for the hygienist course. She liked the job well enough but couldn’t see herself doing it in the long term. ‘I guess I haven’t decided what I want to do yet.’ She asked what I did and, when I explained, she perked up – ‘Oh, you’re that guy’ – and I was inwardly preening when she added, ‘You’re Luke Drumm’s brother, right?’ Her brow furrowed. ‘How is he doing? It must be stressful for your family.’

  Luke had been in the papers. His public breakdowns and bizarre behaviour kept the gossip columnists busy, but I had never made any public statement or comment to the media though my phone rang incessantly after every incident. This young girl got it. It was stressful for all of us, embarrassing in a way that I couldn’t describe to another person without sounding like an utterly selfish pig. No matter what level of success I attained for myself, Luke always hung around my neck like an albatross. There were many days when I wished he’d never been born, for Mum’s sake, for Brian’s sake, for my sake, and even for his own sake because it must have been hard to live with that level of mania and distress all the time.

  I wiped my forehead with a pressed handkerchief.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Kate, ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’

  She was the first and only person I spoke to about Luke – the difficulty of being his brother, the humiliation he caused me, the distraction from my work and my family, the distance I tried to keep from him.

  ‘Not everyone is built to deal with mental illness,’ she said sympathetically. ‘I mean, my granny has dementia and I’m the only one in the family who still goes to see her in the home. And I think there’s still a connection there. It’s hard to tell. I know that’s not as bad as your brother because you can’t exactly lock him up in a home for the rest of his life –’

  ‘Sometimes, I wish I could.’

  Kate put her hand on mine, but it wasn’t flirtatious. I could tell it was a simple gesture of comfort. I could have used that to make my move, but I didn’t.

  I glanced at my watch, realizing I had to collect Daisy. I could be honest with this girl.

  ‘I have to go and collect my daughter,’ I told her.

  ‘Oh, cool! What age is she?’

  ‘Nine.’

  ‘Well, make sure she brushes her teeth, yeah?’

  ‘Oh, I do. Every night. Like clockwork.’

  ‘And every morning too, I hope?’

  ‘My wife does mornings.’

  At the mention of Susan, she gave me a look, and I knew, I just knew that Kate and I were going to have an affair, and that it would be something meaningful, and I desperately wanted that.

  I did not pursue Kate. She called me. One week later, she rang my office and told me she’d been thinking about me and wondered if we could meet again. There was no equivocation in her voice. Kate knew what she wanted.

  I’d never had a girlfriend who was sexually demanding before. Younger women were not as shy as the women of my own generation. She insisted on condoms. I didn’t like using them, but with Kate, I didn’t argue. It was nice not to be the dominant partner for a while. She lived in a high-end apartment near the canal in Ballsbridge. Not a place she could have afforded on a hygienist’s salary alone. She casually mentioned one time that it was ‘one of Daddy’s apartments’. Daddy, I soon learned, was a barrister who specialized in criminal law cases. I’d met him once or twice at dinner parties. She was shocked when I told her that. ‘Jesus! I didn’t think you were that old.’ I reassured her that he was at least fifteen years older than me. She understood the need for secrecy and wanted it for herself. ‘I don’t think my friends would approve,’ she said. It seemed like the perfect arrangement.

  When I wasn’t travelling, we would meet after work, usually at her place, or occasionally I’d drive us out to a restaurant on the outer edges of Dublin where we would not be recognized. I never stayed overnight and she never asked me to. She would occasionally ask about Daisy but never about Susan. Our meetings were infrequent and irregular; there were no promises of commitment. We could go a month without seeing each other and then spend three nights together in the following week. She was not needy and neither was I. These assignations were usually arranged by text, but I was always careful about deleting the messages immediately after I received them. I listed her name in my phone as Roger. The texts were clean and coded. It added to the excitement. I gave Susan no reason to be suspicious. Kate did not wear perfume or lipstick. There were no traces to be found on my collar.

  What did we talk about? The usual things: music, books, TV series, property prices, politics, religion. She was upfront about the fact that she didn’t go to the cinema often. She’d only seen my second film and none of the shorts or documentaries. She thought it was good, but not great. I was hurt by that. I wanted her to lie, to flatter me, but that was not her way. Even though we made no promises to each other, even though there were no declarations of love on either side, this felt like cheating. When I wasn’t with Kate, I found myself thinking about her and wondering what she was doing. Sometimes when she wasn’t available, I jealously wondered if she was with another man. But I never asked. There were unspoken boundaries that we both stuck to.

  About a year after that first encounter at the dental clinic, she vanished. She did not answer my texts. When I called her number, she didn’t pick up the phone and she didn’t respond to my messages. I called the dental surgery to make my annual check-up appointment with her, but when I turned up, a young man called Steve examined me. I casually asked where Kate was. He didn’t know anything about her. He had replaced her several weeks ago. In the beginning, I assumed she was away. She had mentioned travelling to Southeast Asia, but I thought it was odd that she’d go without telling me. I emailed her, a brief, businesslike message, but got nothing back.

  I missed her. I texted her again, left longer messages on her phone. Some nights after work, I drove to her apartment and sat outside, watching to see if she came or went. I tried to gain access one time by slipping through a buzzed door after another resident, but when I got to Kate’s floor, I knocked on the door and, again, there was no answer. I googled her name a hundred times, but Kate Harris was not an unusual name and, apart from an old school hockey team photo, I found nothing.

  In desperation, I checked the death columns. She didn’t feature. I called the de
ntal surgery again, asked if anyone knew where Kate Harris had moved on to. They couldn’t or wouldn’t help me. I did not know any of her friends to ask. My ego was badly bruised. I couldn’t believe that she would do this to me.

  And then, three weeks after I started to look for her, Susan threw the Sunday newspaper over to me on the sofa and said, ‘It looks like Luke has a girlfriend.’

  Luke never had girlfriends. He had groupies. I lifted the paper to read the headline ‘Is Luke Drumm Getting Serious?’ There was a photo of Luke in a pavement café with ‘a mysterious blonde’. It was Kate.

  The article quoted unnamed sources who claimed that Luke had been dating this girl for six months, that she was a stabilizing influence and that he had been attending regular therapy sessions since meeting her. ‘When contacted for comment, Luke declined to name his mystery woman, but said she made his life worth living. We wish Luke and his new love good luck for the future.’

  Susan was pleased when I suggested that Daisy and I have a daddy–daughter day. I volunteered to take her to the zoo, and even though Daisy felt she was too old to go to the zoo again, she knew that a day out with me meant chocolate and sweets and all the things her mother forbade. While she was in the reptile house, I fired off my first angry text to Kate.

  You’re fucking my brother now? Seriously? Is that who you were after all along?

  Then I rang Brian. I went along with the small talk for a few minutes, until he guessed that I didn’t care much about his latest tale of woe and the difficulties of trying to manage Luke’s dwindling career.

  ‘What do you want, William? It’s not like you to call for a chat. Is Daisy okay?’

  I tried to pretend it was all casual. ‘I’m just wondering how Luke is. Susan tells me he has a girlfriend.’

  There was a pause. ‘Well, why don’t you ring him and find out?’

  I laughed. ‘I’m just curious, Brian, I mean, is it true about this girl? Are they serious?’